Talenture Agency has built a creator management model that allows creators to keep 100% of their earnings instead of surrendering a substantial portion to management fees. 

This achievement exemplifies how the agency, managing over 3,000 creators, has reformulated the economics of creator representation.

Founded in 2020 by Ashley Bidelspach and Anthonee Mandani, Talenture Agency emerged from their firsthand experience with, what they consider as, underhanded management practices. 

“The agencies we worked with were taking 40% of our earnings,” Ashley explains. “When you’re live streaming, your audience will send you gifts, they would take 40% of that, which was insane.” Anthonee adds with frustration, “No one was guiding us to do anything. We were just making them money.”

They made their first steps as creators in 2017 on an Asian live streaming platform called Bigo. “After about six months, we became the top live streamers on that platform,” Ashley recalls. This success revealed an opportunity—they were making substantial income from a format few in North America understood.

The founders brought complementary expertise: Ashley built a following of 350,000 on Instagram “back before influencer stuff was a thing” and worked as a talent lead for LiveMe, while Anthonee contributed operational experience, having been “the youngest manager” at a retail company, where he was hired at 16 and eventually became “the hiring manager for all of Canada.”

When COVID-19 hit, they recognized perfect market timing. “Everyone was lonely at home,” notes Ashley. “It was the perfect place for people to connect with others while going through that COVID time.” They leveraged their industry connections, with Ashley tapping her “influencer friends” and Anthonee drawing on contacts in “the dance industry” to build their creator roster.

Their direct-revenue model with TikTok—which eliminates creator commission fees entirely—has proven successful. They earned second place for earnings at TikTok’s Creator Network Summit, where they were showcased in a presentation to other agencies.

Creator Support System

Talenture has constructed a multi-faceted support system designed to maximize creator success without taking a percentage of creator earnings—the opposite of industry norms.

Unique Revenue Model

Unlike traditional management agencies that take 15-20% of earnings—or the predatory agencies they previously worked with that took 40%—Talenture operates on a fundamentally different model.

“We take no cut from their earnings since we’re paid directly from TikTok, and that’s based on our agency’s performance,” Ashley explains. “So our goal is to grow a ton of new creators, so we and the creators are paid out higher.”

This structure creates alignment between agency and creator success: Talenture only succeeds when its creators thrive.

Creator Revenue Streams

Talenture helps creators capitalize on multiple revenue sources. As Ashley explains, “When they stream, they get paid in gifts. The gifts are what viewers send when you’re talking to the camera. Their fans or their viewers look at them as celebrities or someone that they admire and want to support. So they’ll send them gifts in-app, and these gifts translate out to money.”

Beyond these viewer gifts, creators benefit from TikTok’s scaled rewards program, where, Ashley says, “the more days, hours they stream and the more active they are, they get a bonus on top of that.” 

Talenture adds another layer with its own monthly bonus structure that Ashley notes is “based on how active they are or if they’re a top-earning creator in our agency or maybe they’re brand new and they had a crazy month.” 

Additionally, the agency connects creators with “brand deals and UGC,” creating income streams beyond live streaming itself.

Personalized Creator Support

“Our business model is to try to make sure everything is custom towards the creators at the maximum level and works at their pace,” explains Anthonee. 

Rather than applying one-size-fits-all strategies, they assess each creator’s unique goals and capabilities.

This personalized support includes dedicated managers, a key priority for Talenture. “One thing we wanted to make sure, coming into this year, was having each creator have a 1-on-1 manager,” Ashley explains, “making sure they have someone to talk to them 24/7.” 

The agency conducts extensive training, with Ashley noting, “We do four trainings a week,” covering topics from new creator orientation to specialized strategies such as battle techniques.

Creators also benefit from exclusive opportunities, for example, TikTok headquarters trips, where “we flew out a bunch of our creators and let them all meet,” creating networking opportunities and in-person connections. 

Technical resources are provided as well, with Ashley mentioning, “We do stream keys OBS for gamers so they can stream on their laptop or desktop, which TikTok doesn’t offer unless you’re in a creator network.” When problems arise, Talenture offers “ban support. So if they get banned, we can escalate that immediately and get them unbanned if it’s reasonable.”

As Anthonee summarizes using an apt analogy: “It’s like running shoes. You don’t need running shoes to run. But it makes it easier.”

Specialized Expertise in Live Streaming Formats

Talenture’s X factor is its specialized understanding of live-streaming success strategies that differ from traditional social media approaches.

Ashley highlights one particularly successful format they’ve mastered: TikTok “battles”—where creators compete against each other for audience gifts.

“Battles are basically where you’re facing another live streamer in a gift off,” Anthonee explains. “There’s a five-minute timer: their audience versus your audience. Whoever gets the most gifts from their audience wins.”

This expertise in platform-specific formats has produced tangible results. “Two of our creators [@sadiespagehere and @tharookhauler] hit TikTok Live Pro, which is a crazy milestone,” Ashley shares. “That’s 10 million diamonds in one month, which is $50,000 in one month.” 

They’ve also supported gaming creators, such as @zbventress, in achieving Gaming Live Pro status, requiring “1 million diamonds in a month and an average concurrent viewership of 100 people per month.”

Finding the Right Fit

Talenture’s success with creators showcases the importance of matching content to the right platform—a key insight they provide to creators.

Their success story with creator Mandy May Cheetham illustrates this perfectly. After struggling on Bigo, Ashley encouraged her: “Mandy, just try TikTok. I feel like this is where your content will catch an audience.”

With Talenture’s guidance, Mandy’s unique persona—presenting as older while performing rap content—found massive success. “She went so viral,” Ashley recounts. “She started making so much money on [TikTok] Live. She started going on tour all around the world.”

This strategic platform matching extends to their advice for new creators considering where to build their audience. “For example, Twitch, it’s so hard to grow on there if you’re brand new,” Ashley explains, contrasting it with TikTok, where “it’s really easy to get viewership.”

Growth and Obstacles

From its inception, Talenture has experienced consistent, methodical growth. As Ashley describes it, “It’s always been kind of steady growth up. It’s never like we tripled one month or something. It went from 10 million to 15 to 20 and all the way up to 100 million. And it’s been step by step.”

This disciplined approach has paved the way for significant achievements. The agency has scaled to over 3,000 creators across the U.S., UK, and Australia with a management team of “23 managers” expanding to “over 30+ easily.”

However, Talenture’s path hasn’t been without obstacles. As they scaled, they faced two primary challenges.

The first was personalized attention at scale. “As fast as we are growing, we were trying to keep up with the structure, and I noticed some creators maybe needed more attention,” Ashley explains. Their solution was ensuring “each creator has a manager” who is available “24/7.”

The second was platform navigation. “Trying to master new platforms and their regulations and guidelines” presented significant hurdles. “We would have to be the resource for these creators a lot of the times when it comes to a lot of their questions,” Anthonee explains.

These experiences taught them to prioritize research and direct conversations to build stronger platform relationships, leading to their successful partnership with TikTok.

The Expansion

Talenture has ambitious plans for growth across multiple dimensions. Geographically, “we want to expand into more regions,” Anthonee explains. “There’s more markets of opportunity in Latin America, in the Middle East as well as in Asia and the Philippines.”

On the financial front, Ashley aims to “maybe try to double it. Get to 2 million in revenue every month in diamonds.” 

The founders have clear aspirations for brand recognition, with Anthonee stating, “I just want Talenture to be world-renowned. When people think of live streaming, they’re thinking of Talenture.”

Most importantly, they maintain a focus on creator achievement as their ultimate metric. Ashley notes that “growing creators to get more Live Pro levels would be amazing,” emphasizing that creator success remains central to their company mission.

Practical Advice for Live Streaming Success

For creators considering live streaming as a career path, Ashley and Anthonee offer strategic advice based on their extensive experience. 

Consistency is fundamental to success, with Ashley emphasizing, “If you’re streaming one hour a week, you can’t expect growth. You have to go on every day or every day that you can and stream for at least two to three hours.”

They counsel patience and realistic expectations, with Anthonee suggesting that creators should “enjoy it and have zero expectations.” He notes from personal experience that “it took me two, three months to even have a steady two people popping in before I actually got the ground running.”

Anthonee stresses what he calls “the three fundamentals” of successful live streaming: “Quality, quantity, and being coachable.” 

Platform selection is also crucial, with Ashley revealing that “streaming on TikTok is the cheat code to growing your followers,” highlighting the platform’s discovery advantages compared to competitors like Twitch.

As Ashley concludes: “Our core value is making sure that creators aren’t getting ripped off. We give back to our creators because we know how it is being creators ourselves.”